Thanks to my incredibly ambitious and organized friend, Melinda, summer school is off to a great start over here. This year I took some serious planning time before the kids were out of school to chart out what we wanted to learn and accomplish. Melinda had an awesome incentive chart she shared with me that allowed the kids to pick from different treats at different levels based on what they accomplished. Patterning our plan after hers, we have 4 days of school a week with reading, handwriting, poetry, sight word memory for Will and lots of math for Jared. They're also working on writing books and letters, memorizing psalm 23 and the catechism, and reading different proverbs every day. It's A LOT of work. But they get some really great rewards to keep them going, ranging from Popsicles every day to money to play dates. (Holds me accountable to plan playdates! Brilliant!). Jared's been so serious about racking up the rewards that he read the entire full length book, "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe" by CS Lewis in ONE day last week. It was a $4 book on the reward chart. Should have taken him a week! Instead, he read for 7 hours in that one day!!
Tonight, the boys were so excited to spend the money they'd earned to buy books at Half Priced Books. Will used his $6 to buy three books, plus we stopped after and he picked chess set at the Dollar Store. Jared hit the motherlode as they happened to have A LOT of books from the Boxcar Children series in stock. He used his $14.50 as essentially a down payment and cleaned them out of all 16 boxcar books they had in the series. He was able to take 5 of them now and he has a "marker" for the rest of them that he can earn money to buy. How will he earn the money? By being diligent in his schoolwork. He told me he's going to choose the $0.50 per book prize for every book he reads plus the weekly prizeys for worksheets, etc. To prove it, he already finished one of his new books tonight and is started on the second. How awesome is that? Earning credit to buy books by reading books. :-)
And, lest you think the kids are chained to their schoolwork all day, I should add that they're having a blast at summer camp at PCC. They've loved learning some basics if golf and tennis and are rocking their swim meets with the swim team. Last night they each picked up a bunch of ribbons, including each of them getting blues in butterfly - with Jared's time coming in 3rd overall scoring him a medal. It's a rough life, these two. :-)
Here are some of the sheets for our "summer school":
We also picked up tonight the full version if "Pilgrim's Progress" on Jared's request for daddy nighttime reading and a new to me Jane Austen that I'm super excited to dive into! Hooray for cheap books! As my friend Erin noted, cheaper than library fines. Amen to that! I'm the worst with library books!!
PS: HPB has an awesome summer reading program where kids can earn $5 for both June and July with reading. We are all over it!
http://freebies.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=freebies&cdn=hobbies&tm=12&f=00&tt=11&bt=1&bts=14&zu=http%3A//hpb.com/fyb/
1 comment:
Are you guys homeschooling?
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